Rirkrit Tiravanija – "The Way Things Go" Artist Lecture 2/23/2015

23 February 2015 7:30 pm

The UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice Wiesenfeld Visiting Artist Lecture Series with co-sponsors The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley, The Berkeley Center for New Media, The David Brower Center, and The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts present:

Rirkrit Tiravanija – “The Way Things Go”

Free, accessible, and open to the public

Seating will be on a first-come, first-served basis.

The venue recommends arriving at 7 pm – the doors will open at 7:15. There is a lot of interest in this event, and seating is limited. We will set up an audio feed for overflow. For those that cannot attend, the video will be posted online as soon as possible. (In the past there was a seating reservation system, but this has been discontinued.)

Well-known for installations which invite viewers to cook, share meals, and interact with one another, Rirkrit Tiravanija is widely recognized as playing a critical role in the development of artwork that engages the social space, and has been cited by French critical theorist Nicolas Bourriaud as a key example of his theory of Relational Aesthetics.

In this Artist Lecture, Tiravanija will discuss his current exhibit, on view at The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from February 13th – May 24th, 2015; The Way Things Go is an expansive curatorial project which uncovers narratives, reveals personal stories, and shares vignettes that lead to a larger understanding of migration of people in the production of material culture.

Tiravanija invited artists from Asia and Europe, as well as from the San Francisco Bay Area, to contribute works related to the circulation and anthropology of seeds, plants, food, recipes, and related materials of kitchen culture that have circulated across regions and time. Featuring 12 artists projects and a wide range of work, from mixed-media installations to film, video, archive-oriented art, The Way Things Go explores how personal effects, gourds, seeds, a recipe, and sugar all yield stories that go beyond each artist’s personal intention, and creates a larger story of interwoven meanings embedded in cultural geography and spatial history.

In Tiravanija’s artworks, “things” often function as props for visitors to create something of their own, creating cultural products, which in turn, foster social production, and demonstrate how origins, journeys, and the stories that surround them are catalysts for bringing people into a more intimate understanding of themselves and the interdependence of cultures. In the exhibition, featured artists share personal and focused stories that open up to larger scenes of human interaction and engagement by redrawing boundaries of trade and labor, colonization, political affiliation, and war—all of which have a profound impact on vernacular, local, and indigenous experiences. Participating artists are: Maria Thereza Alves, Michael Arcega, Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Camille Henrot, Luc Moullett, Museum of Gourd, the National Bitter Melon Council, Pratchaya Phinthong, Arin Rungjang, Thasnai Sethaseree, Shimabuku, and SUPERFLEX in collaboration with the Propeller Group.